Do psychedelic experiences really benefit us? What if they could spur on a healthy lifelong meditation practice?

In his book “Ayahuasca Test Pilots”, author and explorer “Medicine Hunter” Chris Kilham goes into detail about his own personal experiences with ayahuasca—the potent South American psychedelic plant brew—as well as the scientific factors responsible for the confounding introspective journey the plants offer.

What we know about ayahuasca’s effects can be broken down into its parts: chemicals in the plants combined to make the brew, trigger a rush of DMT (N,N-Dimethyltryptamine) into the brain that take us into other realms of consciousness, if not other planes of reality altogether, that we can’t normally experience without the assistance of the chemical. But it seems how the two plants that make up the mixture came to be used together will always be a mystery. Did ancient tribes experiment with thousands of plants, or like many shamans explain, did the plants “speak” to the people of the jungle and tell them of the benefits if brewed together? Either way, Kilham’s “test pilot” reference might be more accurate if described as “ayahuasca astronauts”—as journeyers of the medicine believe they’re not testing anything out, but rather exploring unchartered territories of the universe and the human mind.

Ayahuasa, Kilham writes in “Ayahuasca Test Pilots” can help us gain access to “multiple dimensions, and become suffused with absolute and complete love.”

For many Westerners, it may sound like little more than an excuse to “get high”–and while that’s flawed thinking, it’s also completely understandable. Since the Controlled Substances Act went into effect more than 40 years ago, we’ve been forced to transform our perception of plant medicines as little more than addictive, harmful products that can ruin your life, and possibly send you to jail for a long, long time. Nevermind the fact that “drugs” like ayahuasca can actually help people break their drug addiction (to substances like cocaine and heroin), or that MDMA—the active component in the popular party drug Ecstasy—is being used in clinical trials to help our soldiers recover from PTSD, or that psilocybin can be more effective than pharmaceutical anti-depressants.

The modern view of psychedelics is about as deranged and deluded as it gets—a somewhat ironic situation when we’re talking about plants that can make you think you’ve turned into a snake, or are being swallowed up by one. For the most part, our culture brushes off psychedelics as fodder for mental breakdowns, violence and hysteria, even though that’s not the case for most seekers.

Psychedelics, it turns out, may actually foster a deeply spiritual “awakening” that can encourage many positive life changes, including a healthy meditation practice, long after the hallucinogenic experience has subsided. And likewise, a strong meditation practice already in place, can help ground a seeker through the discomfort and challenges of a psychedelic journey, like an ayahuasca ceremony. “If a meditative practice can facilitate psychedelic exploration, it makes sense that the converse is also true,” Reset.Me reports on its website.

And why does this matter?

Because, if used properly, psychedelics like ayahuasca, San Pedro cactus, peyote, psilocybin mushrooms and MDMA can provide deep insights and healing opportunities. And let’s be real; who among us is not in need of healing? A meditation practice can continue that work, bringing balance and presence to the seeker long after the effects of the medicine have worn off. This matters in handling ongoing grief, stress, anxiety, depression and scores of other woes of the human spirit. Life is already quite a psychedelic journey—one that can be too much for many of us to handle without daily crutches like illegal or prescription drugs, alcohol and other not-so-good-for-us tools. So is it really all that surprising that psychedelics and meditation can offer us some healthy perspective on it all?

“You can approach ayahuasca from any angle,” writes Kilham. “You can meet it open-minded, skeptical, assure of its value, doubtful or in any state.”

That’s not to say you need to take psychedelics in order to start or maintain a strong meditation practice (nor do you need one to journey with psychedelic medicines). But what is becoming ever more clear is the link between the two, and the long-term benefits. We no longer need to fear psychedelic medicines as sinister substances destined to lead us to a life of crime, nor do we need to brush off meditation as a woo-woo New Agey gimmick or question its efficacy. In fact, studies show there are significant benefits to meditation, from aiding in the recovery of physical injuries to improved concentration and performance in students.

“Ayahuasca, if you drink a working dose, will often drive you right to the edge of what you can endure in terms of energy, healing and stripping away those aspects of your psyche that do not serve you well,” writes Kilham. “Ayahuasca acts as a psychic blowtorch, with the capacity to cut through and reduce to cinders what does not work.”

It seems if we know one thing for certain about both psychedelics and meditation, it’s that we’ve barely begun to scratch the surface on the benefits and opportunities both can provide us in not only navigating our own life experiences, but in assisting others as well.

[Note: Psychedelics are illegal in the U.S. and we do not encourage their use without the guidance of an experienced counselor or therapist in an approved controlled environment.]

Find Jill on Twitter @jillettinger and Instagram @jill_ettinger

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 Psychedelic image via Shutterstock

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When you get an email from Michael Pollan, you open it.

Ok, well it’s not like I’m receiving personal emails from Pollan (although one can always dream), but when we recently sent out an email with a link to some of his latest work, I was intrigued.

Pollan was sending out a link to his latest article in The New Yorker, The Trip Treatment, in which he takes a look at the new research into psychedelics, specifically the use of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms.

NYU has been performing research on cancer patients, in its Psilocybin Cancer Anxiety Study, and with very positive results, which Pollan uses to kick off his article. Pollan wrote in his email, “This might at first seem like a departure from writing about food. But those who have followed my work for some time know I’ve also had a longstanding interest in altered states of consciousness. I wrote about cannabis in “The Botany of Desire” and opium in Harper’s Magazine. For me, these remarkable molecules are part of the same co-evolutionary story, products of nature with the power to change us.”

But while nature may have the power to change us, in terms of being able to research it, in the past few decades, the doors remained closed. “Between 1953 and 1973, the federal government spent four million dollars to fund a hundred and sixteen studies of LSD, involving more than seventeen hundred subjects,” writes Pollan. “Through the mid-nineteen-sixties, psilocybin and LSD were legal and remarkably easy to obtain.” Later in 1970, Richard Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act, prohibiting the use of most psychedelics for any purpose.

Now, those doors are slowly starting to open again, and researchers are looking back into the use of psilocybin for mental health treatment, and there are clinical trials taking place across the country, from NYU to Johns Hopkins to UCLA. The hope is that researchers can use psilocybin to treat not only anxiety, but addiction and depression.

There is certainly a fear that advocating for such research is that the public will assume that psilocybin is a drug that’s safe for use. “The recreational use of psychedelics is famously associated with instances of psychosis, flashback, and suicide,” Pollan explains. “But these adverse effects have not surfaced in the trials of drugs at N.Y.U. and Johns Hopkins. After nearly five hundred administrations of psilocybin, the researchers have reported no serious negative effects.”

But Pollan is quick to point out why this is: “This is perhaps less surprising than it sounds, since volunteers are self-selected, carefully screened and prepared for the experience, and are then guided through it by therapists well trained to manage the episodes of fear and anxiety that many volunteers do report. Apart from the molecules involved, a psychedelic therapy session and a recreational psychedelic experience have very little in common.”

Psilocybin isn’t the only hallucinogen that has been researched lately for its link to mental health benefits. In 2014 a study was published in the Journal of Pharmacology that looked at the benefits of LSD-assisted psychotherapy, in regards to anxiety associated with life-threatening diseases. The researchers concluded, “LSD administered in a medically supervised psychotherapeutic setting can be safe and generate lasting benefits in patients with a life-threatening disease. Explanatory models for the therapeutic effects of LSD warrant further study.”

While mostly associated counterculture, psychedelics have played a role in some of the more mainstream of our cultural role models. Apple CEO Steve Jobs once told a New York Times reporter that “doing LSD was one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life,” prompting LSD inventor Albert Hofmann to write a personal letter to Jobs in 2007 asking for funding for research into psychedelics and mental health treatment.

In a study at Johns Hopkins a few years ago, researchers looked at the effects of psilocybin and long-lasting psychological growth. According to Time, “Fourteen months after participating in the study, 94% of those who received the drug said the experiment was one of the top five most meaningful experiences of their lives; 39% said it was the single most meaningful experience.” Friends and family of the participants also reported that participants were calmer, happier and kinder.

The goal for all of these researchers, whether their research is on addicts or terminally ill patients, is to try to remove the bad reputation that psychedelics have gotten over the past few decades and to build on the promising research that exists.

How will the rest of society respond? That’s a question that remains unanswered.

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The post Are Magic Mushrooms and Other Psychedelics the Trick to Better Health? appeared first on EcoSalon.

 

Has the War on Drugs got it all wrong? A new research study finds use of hallucinogens, including psychedelic “magic” mushrooms, mescaline, and LSD, doesn’t cause long-term psychological problems. In fact, use of psychedelics may even reduce the need for mental health treatments.

There’s a renaissance happening around hallucinogens. Westerners seeking physical and emotional healing are traveling deep into Amazon jungle territory to drink a potent plant brew called ayahuasca, rich in DMT, “the spirit molecule.” [Full disclosure: I recently traveled to the Colombian rainforest to drink ayahuasca under the supervision of shamans.] They’re also venturing into West Africa for iboga healings with the Bwiti tribe in order to cure themselves of addiction to drugs like heroine. Others are participating in studies, like those conducted by the  Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), which is proving the efficacy of MDMA (the active ingredient in the street drug Ecstasy) in treating PTSD and other serious psychological issues. LSD and psilocybin mushrooms are being used to ease the anxiety experienced by cancer patients. Go to any of the myriad music, art and culture festivals or gatherings cropping up around the globe (including those focused on the use of psychedelics), and you’ll find a wide variety of people using hallucinogens in all manners of exploration, from straight up dancing and partying to the ceremonial and healing applications.

Approximately one in six Americans between the ages of 21 and 64 has tried hallucinogens. Still, the substances are highly criminalized, and, perhaps even worse, stigmatized as doorways into madness and addiction. Use of hallucinogens is a practice deemed only slightly acceptable during those experimental college years where promiscuity and binge drinking are also sloughed off as young adult rites of passage. Speaking candidly about the use of hallucinogens is akin to coming out of the closet about being a lesbian or homosexual just a half century ago. Announcing an unconventional sexual orientation would often earn you pariah status; it wasn’t something to discuss with just anybody. And the same goes for the medicinal benefits of hallucinogens. (At the very least, you don’t inhale.) In most social circles in our Western culture, using psychedelics is formidable for anyone over age 21. It’s not casual dinner conversation. Antidepressants and prescription anxiety drugs? Well, they’re the new normal. You can talk about those all you like. But tell the wrong person that you participated in an experimental MDMA trial to deal with crippling PTSD? It’s likely to be almost as mood-altering as the drugs themselves.

But could we be all wrong about psychedelic medicine?

According to researchers out of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s Department of Neuroscience who published their findings in the recent issue of the journal PLOS One, there were no links that connected the use of psychedelic hallucinogens to a wide range of mental health problems including mood and anxiety disorders, psychosis and general psychological distress.

The research team reviewed survey data collected between 2001 and 2004 from more than 130,000 randomly selected Americans. More than 20,000 of the subjects admitted to using hallucinogens, and the findings were consistent among the individuals: “The lack of association between the use of psychedelics and indicators of mental health problems in this large population survey is consistent with clinical studies in which LSD or other psychedelics have been administered to healthy volunteers,” the researchers wrote.

NPR reports that the study does have some limitations, however: “It’s possible that healthier people are more likely to take psychedelics than those already struggling with mental illness, for instance.” And the study also didn’t consider dosages or quality of the drugs, nor did it look at family histories of mental health, “which could be an important factor.”

While still illegal in the U.S., the amount of research now being done to explore the potential benefits of psychedelics is increasing. Matthew W. Johnson, a psychologist in the psychiatry department at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine told NPR that there seems to be “no evidence of overall negative impact — and even some hints of benefit — associated with the use of psychedelics.” Johnson recently explored the effects of psychedelic mushrooms on cancer patients to help them deal with the anxiety and depression around their illness.

MAPS’ groundbreaking work on MDMA and PTSD has already shown that “MDMA in conjunction with psychotherapy can help people overcome PTSD, and possibly other disorders as well.” They note that MDMA is known for “increasing feelings of trust and compassion towards others, which could make an ideal adjunct to psychotherapy for PTSD.”

And while the Norwegian researchers acknowledge their study doesn’t allow conclusions about causality, the team found that there is a lack of evidence “that psychedelics cause lasting mental health problems.”

Mental health issues in the U.S. are skyrocketing, based on prescription drug sales for mood enhancers and antidepressants. As Americans struggle to handle their mental conditions, just as many struggle to get a grip on healthy eating habits, the pro-psychedelic community is hopeful that a return to more ‘natural’ treatments for mental and emotional issues may begin to become less stigmatized. And what researchers are finding supports the theories that there may not only be a reduced risk of harm from hallucinogens, but inherent mental health benefits to exploring those edge realms of consciousness as well.

Unlike pharmaceutical drugs, which require long-term usage, and can include numerous undesirable side-effects, a few “psychedelic sessions” can help individuals to acknowledge, confront and resolve certain issues, particularly those that are mental, psychological or emotional–which can often manifest as physical conditions. According to MAPS, “The deep personal and often spiritual experiences enabled by the careful use of psilocybin and LSD are well known.”

Timing of the research couldn’t be better for mood-altering substances, either. CNN’s chief medical expert, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, recently apologized for “misleading Americans” over the safety and benefits of medical marijuana. He’s released a documentary on the subject and said “sometimes marijuana is the only thing that works.” Perhaps he’ll explore LSD next.

Keep in touch with Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

Image: doomz, kt lindsay

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